Is it warm?

 

One of the questions we've been asked the most about our new home built by SEED Homes of Calgary is around insulation and warmth. It's a fair question for a first of its kind: a unique modular building that arrived on a truck, was placed on engineered screw piles, unwrapped, unfolded and set up in a single day. 

With R30+ in the roof and walls, and spray foam insulation under the floor along with thermal windows by Pella, we are toasty inside while it feels like -20 outside. The in-floor heating, set rather conservatively at around 21 degrees in most of the rooms, supported by an electric forced air furnace makes the house feel very comfortable. The big test will happen on Friday when we will have our first run at super cold conditions (forecast says it will feel like -37). 

I love the warmth of the bamboo floors in our home. The tiles in the bathroom feel great, too, even though we keep the in-floor heating set lower. We'll have a guest staying over for a few days next week, so we'll bump up the temperature in the guest bathroom just to make it extra comfortable. 

We had a wonderful visit from Stephen, Adrian, and Darren from the SEED Homes team yesterday. They had come to check out a number of finishing issues and to give us a status update about Birdsong Studio 3.0, a second building that will house our painting studio, office and the Birds Nest (a small Airbnb suite). It will reap the benefits of being the second SEED Homes building as many lessons were learned with the first. It is a smaller building and less complicated than our 1,200 sq ft bungalow. As such, its heating solution will be a slightly different design. We love the fact that we were able to be part of that conversation as the placing of vents has a significant impact on how we set things up.

Birdsong Studio 3.0 will ship in early February and take a number of weeks to set up. Conceivably, by the end of February, both buildings will be up and running. All that will be left to do in the spring will be decking, fencing and landscaping.